Rupert Sheldrake "A Seal in Time"

Tähenduse teejuhid (Maps of Meaning) is an Estonian language monthly newspaper that is distributed with the country's largest daily Postimees. The first issue came out in September 2020. The centre of gravity of each number is a ca 4000-word interview. The first interview with Rupert Sheldrake appeared in the 11th issue of the paper (August 2021). Here are seven highlights from this interview.
1. In the 19th century Henri Bergson came out with his great book “Matter and Memory”. This year we celebrate the 125th anniversary of the French publication of “Matière et mémoire”. Bergson put forward the idea that memories are not stored in the brain, instead there is a direct continuity over time. This idea was also explored by Bertrand Russell in his idea of mnemic memory causation as a possible form of causation directly connecting across time. Ludwig Wittgenstein also explored the similar view of memory as not involving physical traces. So its certainly been dicussed by some Western philosophers.
2. I met Jacques Benveniste at an alternative science conference in Paris. The thing about Benveniste that I found suprising was that he was by nature so nonalternative. He was actually a quite conventional and rather arrogant materialist. He was not someone who had come into science with spiritual views or anything. He had got interested in the subject of water memory, done experiments, come up with suprising results and published them. As a result, he found himself subject to a phenomenal amount of attack. Suddenly he was in the midst of a witch-hunt and was completely baffled by it because he was not used to it. For he was used to be being a respected member of the French scientific establishment.
3. Maddox was upset and angry because I was a card-carrying member of the science establishment. I had been a fellow at Cambridge, I had been a research fellow at the Royal Society. I had met Maddox when I was at Cambridge and I had published articles in Nature. I think he saw me as a kind of traitor. In a later attack on my work – I think it was my book “Seven Experiments That Could Change the World” that he reviewed in Nature or in one of our British newspapers – he compared me to an elapsed Jesuite attacking the church of Rome. He kept coming out with these ecclesiastical metaphors.
4. When I said in the 1980s that genes were grossly overrated, people thought that I was joking. But I was not joking. We know what genes do, they code for the sequence of aminoacids in proteins, some of them are also involved in switching off and on other genes. But making the right proteins does not explain the web-spinning behaviour of a young spider. It explains the proteins that are in the web but it does not explain the shape of the web.
5. The Reformation was obviously a radical break with the past for the countries in the Northern Europe where it happened. It had several major effects. One of them was to disenchant the world. Before the Reformation there was the belief that the Christian Europe shared with the rest of the world, with the non-Christian and pre-Christian cultures. The belief that nature is alive that we live in a living world that the stars and the planets are living beings that animals and plants are truly living being that Mother Earth is a living being. The God that they thought of was in nature and nature was in God – a view that is now called panentheism. There was a divine presence in all nature and human life was a part of a larger divine order in living cosmos. We played a role in it but were by no means the only players.
6. The reason I wrote these two books (“Science and Spiritual Practices” and “Ways to Go Beyond”) is because I think that we are in a cultural and spiritual crisis in Europe. The decline of traditional religion, namely Christianity, means that large numbers of young people are growing up without any sense of our spiritual and religious traditions. According to one recent survey, here in Britain more than 50 per cent of the population has no religion. Most young people are growing up with no knowledge or connection with the Christian tradition. Yet, I think there is a need for the connection beyond the merely mundane for the materialist worldview gives a very limited view of human nature.
7. Fasting is very beneficial not only in bodily sense but also in emotional and spiritual sense. It also helps us to be aware how much we depend on food. We should not take our steady food supply for granted. Fasting has many benefits. For one, it is free. In fact it actually saves money because you do not have to buy food. If I ran the National Health Service here in Britain, I would encourage fasting to improve the health of our nation.